Lenin’s Tomb, fiction by Afghan women, last mile democracy in Bihar and more 

Welcome to this edition of  The Hindu on Books Newsletter.

On Monday, Russian President Vladimir ordered troops into eastern Ukraine after signing a decree to recognise two breakaway territories in the Donbas region, the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk Peoples’s Republic. In a speech, Mr. Putin harped on the history of the USSR, the formation of Ukraine itself, saying, “Ukraine never had a tradition of genuine statehood.” The last days of the Imperium or the Russian empire then known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (that dissolved into smaller republics in 1991) have been recorded by several writers from David Remnick to Ryszard Kapuscinski and Svetlana Alexievich. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book,  Lenin’s Tomb (Penguin), Remnick writes about Nadezhda Mandelstam who had seen her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam being sent off to the camps during the 1930s, and had written elaborate notes on how the regime left its subjects in a “permanent state of fear.” She had seen signs of the Soviet system’s inherent weakness and believed in the resiliency of the people. “It will take many books and records to understand the history of the Soviet Union and its final collapse. We are, after all, still debating the events of 1917 [the Bolshevik revolution]. To write history takes time,” says Remnick, as he explains why Russian democracy is a “delicate thing”. To understand the fall will require a new library covering an immense range of subjects, writes Remnick, who went to Moscow to report for  The Washington Post in 1988 for ten years, and lists the following: “U.S.-Soviet relations, economic history, the uprisings of the Baltic states, the Caucasus, Ukraine, and Central Asia, the ‘pre-history’ of perestroika, the psychological and sociological effects of a long-standing totalitarian regime.”

In other news, Hachette has just published a book of new fiction by Afghan women,  My Pen is the Wing of a Bird. The title is taken from the epigraph by the writer Baitool Haidari, “My pen is the wing of a bird;/it will tell you those thoughts we are not allowed to think,/those dreams we are not allowed to dream.” Since the Taliban swept back to power in August 2021, questions have swirled around what will happen to scores of Afghan women who want to continue their education and work for a living. In her introduction, veteran journalist Lyse Doucet says that the stories offer a “resilience, a release.” The women write about onions frying in the kitchen, the jingle of an ice-cream cart or a pair of boots, but also about blood-soaked weddings, dangerous journeys to work and back, and other horrors.

In reviews, we read a ear-to-the-ground account of last mile democracy in Bihar, veteran diplomats on India’s foreign policy, Salim Ali’s radio broadcasts which called for the protection of both birds and habitat, the undiminished importance of James Joyce’s  Ulysses in its centenary year and more.

In his book on Bihar,  Last Among Equals (Westland Books) M.R. Sharan provides a closely observed, scholarly, and empathetic account of the struggle to make constitutional promises a reality in rural India. Originally a Karnataka native, Sharan has been a close observer and participant in the peoples’ movement around MGNREGA as well as other issues in rural Bihar for over ten years, says Amit Basole in his review. “He has carried out large-scale surveys, visited government officials at the village, block, district and State level, and spoken to thousands of workers in this time. Grounding his narrative in data as well as stories (and funny anecdotes), he introduces the reader to the workings of ‘last mile democracy,’ i.e. panchayat-level politics, how welfare programmes work (or do not work), why it matters that programme funds are sent directly to the ward instead of through the panchayat, and above all how salient local caste relations remain to explain outcomes. Along the way, we learn of the fascinating history of caste-based reservations for Mukhiyas in Bihar, from its origin as an ordinance in the 1980s during the Bindeshwari Dubey government to its passage as a law 18 years later.”

Last Among Equals: Power, Caste and Politics in Bihar’s Villages review: Last mile democracy 

Amid complex diplomatic interpolations comes a compendium of essays authored by more than 30 of India’s most senior diplomats.  India’s Foreign Policy in the Post-COVID Times: Through the Eyes of Indian Diplomats (Wisdom Tree). Edited by former ambassador Surendra Kumar, it presents an up-to-date analysis of the present situation, and the challenges faced in 30 different areas, each according to their expertise: from overviews of India’s challenges on security and several economic issues (by Shyam Saran, Shivshankar Menon and Rahul Chhabra), to essays on COVID and climate change, the specifics of India’s relations with the U.S., Russia, China, the EU, West Asia, Central Asia, Africa, Japan, Brazil and Mexico, primers on India’s ‘Act East’, Indo-Pacific, diaspora and soft power policies. In her review, Suhasini Haidar writes that “each essay is a handy masterclass. Of particular note is the editor’s decision to include separate chapters on each of India’s neighbours, written by envoys to those countries. Insights on the current Ukraine crisis and the difficulty of prising the Russia-China relationship loose (P.S. Raghavan), the larger objective behind Chinese aggression in times of COVID (Neelam Sabharwal), the importance of focusing on UN Security Council reform for India (Asoke Kumar Mukerji) make for thoughtful reading on current events. The real charm of the essays is the freedom with which skilled practitioners have shared their analysis without hesitations about protocol or political pressure.”